All posts tagged ‘home’

The Roomba 650 is designed to handle fibers like hair, pet fur, lint and carpet fuzz. Image: iRobot.

There were so many excellent entries for our iRobot Roomba 650 giveaway last week. After witnessing all of the robot love, the GeekMom staff really wishes that we had enough robots for everyone. Of course, then we would probably opt to rule the world!

That said, we just had one and Michelle Angell was the lucky winner with her entry. Congratulations, Michelle! So what is Michelle’s favorite robot of all-time? Take a peek at her entry:

Thanks to everyone who entered and to the people at iRobot for supplying Michelle with a minion to call her very own. For more information about this prize, check out GeekMom’s iRobot Roomba 650 review.

The Roomba 650 can get into under chairs, tables, beds, and more. Image: iRobot.

The robot revolution is coming. Will you be ready? If not, you can arm yourself with a brand new iRobot Roomba 650 — absolutely free. There are only a few days left to enter our giveaway. Just go to the original GeekMom giveaway post and follow entry instructions by our September 23 deadline.

Not sure if you’d want to invite this little robotic buddy into your home? (Believe me, you definitely want to do that.) Check out our iRobot Roomba 650 review.

In last week’s iRobotRoomba 650 review, I mentioned that my house has been the cleanest it’s been in a while, all thanks to this always-eager electronic helper. It works on carpets, hardwood, tile and laminate floors, picking up hair, pet fur, lint, carpet fuzz and other funky debris that can accumulate on a daily basis.

The Roomba 650 is designed to handle fibers like hair, pet fur, lint, and carpet fuzz. Image: iRobot.

Being a GeekMom doesn’t mean that I’m a clean mom — certainly not as clean as I should be. I have those off-days where I fear the mailman or a passerby will see the squalor that sometimes engulfs my home. It’s hard enough to pick up the Lego, the dirty clothes, the Cheerios, and the baseball cards; I’m expected to sweep and/or vacuum every day as well?

The Roomba 650 is the latest in iRobot’s long fleet of robotic helpers. Designed for those of you with overwhelming dust and dirt, the Roomba 650 packs in iRobot’s patented three-stage cleaning system, a new brush design, and something called AeroVac Technology.

That AeroVac perk means that this latest model has better airflow, so you won’t have to clean it out as much. Hooray for additional loafing time! Other features include iAdapt Responsive Cleaning Technology so the Roomba knows where to roam, Dirt Detect to help it sniff out the dirtiest areas, and the option to preset cleaning schedules up to seven times a week.

Roomba’s clock and controls are right on top of the unit. Image: iRobot.

My musical inclinations have always been incredibly broad, and the rise of Internet radio has only served to further enable my tastes. When at home, my family vacillates between Bavarian drinking music, The Beatles, Garth Brooks and the soundtrack to Nickelodeon. It’s fairly disorienting to suddenly switch gears, as we frequently do. So I was excited to come out of my cave and discover the wide world of freestanding Internet radio players. Logitech sent me the Squeezebox Touch to play with, to see if it would meet the needs of this geek family.

Image: Amazon

The Squeezebox Touch makes me feel like Jane Jetson; it is one of those things I was promised along with my hover car, for which I am still waiting by the way. For example, it has a light sensor that adjusts to the brightness of the room, and is motion sensitive, waking from sleep mode when you pass by. Technically, it packs a pretty big punch in a small space:

This week we are continuing our discussion of our book club pick for June, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson (AKA The Bloggess). Before we get to the discussion questions for this week, there is some news about the book club that I need to share.

The GeekMom Book Club will be taking the month of July off and will be returning in August with a brand new format. I can tell you that we will be readingA Wrinkle In Timeby Madeleine L’Engle, which is one of my favorite books. I hope that everyone will come back to have a great discussion of this classic in August.

But now on to our questions for this week:

Jenny talks about how her hometown changed over the years after she had gotten married and moved away. She comes to the realization that home is wherever Victor is. What is home for you? Is it a place or is it being with loved ones?

Making friends as an adult can be hard, but the internet makes it a little easier to find friends with similar interests. Jenny finds some great girlfriends through a blogger retreat to Napa Valley but she first made contact via the internet. Has the internet helped you find friends?

Many of our daily conversations are dominated by some combination of these four topics: Our homes, our partners, our children, and our appearance. This is particularly true for women, as social pressures drive us to focus on these things above all else. However, habit can become stifling, and it’s probably not healthy to fulfill any stereotype too well.

So here’s the challenge: Go one day without talking about your home, your partner, your children, or your appearance. Do what you must to make it happen. If you find yourself veering into a conversation about these things, change the subject to one of your other interests. Plan ahead to keep yourself busy with or distracted by something new!

It’s just one day. It may not even be hard. But it might be interesting, it might be fun, and it might add a little self-appreciation to the things that already matter to us. And who knows? We might find we have even more of interest in common than our everyday lives suggest.

One of our many responsibilities as parents is keeping our kids healthy. And as mothers, it seems we make the majority of doctor appointments and are usually the ones who take them, too.

However, moving into a new area can be a challenge. When we moved back to Oklahoma in 2005, we had to choose a pediatrician rather quickly. Normally I like to do an interview or at the very least a “meet the doctor” kind of appointment. However, since my daughter was sick, we went to a pediatrician that family recommended. We were less than pleased. The doctor had terrible rapport with my daughter. She ignored her and asked me about her symptoms and when she did talk to her, she talked to her like a baby. She dismissed any concerns I had and always seemed to be in a hurry. Continuity of care was poor as we were shuffled around to other doctors in the practice. There was even one visit where my daughter was scheduled for a well visit the week she got an ear infection. The pediatrician refused to do the well visit and made us come back in two days for it. After this visit, I began to look for a new pediatrician.

Typically, when you are looking for a pediatrician you go through a checklist: Do they have office hours that will work for you? Is the office clean? Is the doctor a member of a group or practicing on his own? Is the staff friendly and knowledgeable? Is the pediatrician open to your observations and thoughts as a parent? Are you able to contact the pediatrician after hours?

That last one was a big deal to us and I was surprised to find when I had my first child that it is unusual to be able to contact a pediatrician after hours. I was either referred to a nurse line or to an Urgent Care. When I started looking for a new pediatrician before the birth of our second child, I wanted someone who was old school but wasn’t afraid of technology. So when pumping my friends for information about their doctors I always asked them three things:

If they were able to contact their pediatrician after hours and how.

If their pediatrician had a website. If they do, you can explore it and see how in depth it is.

What positive and negative experiences they had had with their pediatrician.

A pediatrician’s website is typically a good indication of how tech savvy the office and doctor are. We have all seen mediocre to bad sites that are more a waste of time than beneficial. A pediatrician with a good website allows you to register as a patient, contact the office, and explore basic medical information. If it is a really good site, you can log in securely to see your current prescriptions and request refills, view well visit data, see immunization records, and make appointments.

Turns out several of my co-workers went to the same pediatrician and after looking at his website, we made the switch. Our pediatrician is tech savvy and keeps his patients up to date on things he is seeing in the office and/or articles he has read via Twitter, Facebook, and his own blog. Not only that, but we have access to him 24/7 via his cell and e-mail. How many pediatricians do you know who still do that? Our old one sure didn’t. He also has great rapport with both my kids, listens to our concerns, and most importantly, he takes his time! What a novel concept in the field of medicine.

All of this may sound too good to be true–but wait, there is more. Our pediatrician recently started doing home visits. Seriously. Check out the interview he did for our local TV station: Tulsa Doctor Trades Office For House Calls

He came to our house for our son’s two month check up, ready with shots and his nurse in tow. They brought a scale and all the typical paraphernalia with them. The examination and shots were administered in the comfort of our living room and our son was over the shock in less than a minute. Throughout the appointment, our doctor used an iPad to enter all the data about the visit and to update our little ones prescription. After the visit, we said goodbye and our little guy went down for a nap.

My only regret is that we didn’t switch pediatricians sooner. So the moral of the story is: if you are unhappy with your child’s doctor, badger your friends and hit Google to find a new one. It may be one of the best things you can do for the health of your children and your own piece of mind.

Hello, world! Welcome to the new GeekMom blog. We consist of four active geek mom editors—Natania Barron, Kathy Ceceri, Corrina Lawson, and Jenny Williams—and a gaggle of geek mom contributors, led by the publisher of the popular GeekDad blog, Ken Denmead. We have a vision of what this site will be: a source of geeky news, opinion, and information; a safe place to be yourself; and a community of geeky people with both similar and varied experiences. September 1st is our soft launch while we work out the kinks and streamline our processes. We’re also looking for input from you, our readers, about what you’d like to see here. Take a look around our beta site and let us know what you think. Our formal launch date is October 1, so stay tuned for exciting features, surprise guests, and lots of giveaways and contests!

In the meantime, please comment on posts and have discussions in our Living Room (forums). We want to hear about your own experiences regarding the topics and products we cover. Again, welcome. We hope you’ll feel at home here.

Here are our introductions, in mostly alphabetic order.

Hey all. I’m Natania. I’m a mom, a writer, and an unrepentant geek. I grew up in the 80s, playing video games on Atari and Nintendo, immersing myself in science fiction and fantasy books, and generally learning to make any food I could think of from scratch. In 2000, my freshman year of college, I met my husband on a MUSH, a text-based role playing game. In 2006, we had our son. And while I planned to be a professor all my life, our son’s mere presence changed the way I ordered my aspirations, and I decided to leave traditional employment and stay home and write speculative fiction. In the last three years I’ve been a write-at-home mom, I’ve written six novels, a dozen short stories, and hundreds of blog posts (including those in places like GeekDad, Geeks Are Sexy, and Amazon)—not to mention that I’ve spent precious time with with my son, getting to know him and teach him. I can honestly say, as busy and hectic and unpredictable as life is these days, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.

Hi, I’m Kathy. I’ve been a work-at-home mom for nearly 20 years, writing about the ins and outs of family life and ways to have fun with your kids. I joined the GeekDad team in 2007 as their first regular GeekMom contributor, so I’m thrilled to finally have a website to call our own! I’m currently finishing up my third educational book for kids, and getting ready for another season of school and library programs combining science, history and art. Together with my husband I also homeschool our two teenage boys. I look forward to getting to know all the great new GeekMom writers and you, our readers!

Hi! I’m Corrina and I’ve been a geek before I knew what it was. I grew up in rural Vermont and superhero comics, the Science Fiction Book Club and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine were my windows to the rest of the world. Inspired by Lois Lane, I grew up to be a reporter if not for a major metropolitan newspaper, at least a daily newspaper. I also worked as a store manager for Barnes & Noble. But all that outside the house work ended when I gave birth to the twin minions, kids number three and four. With four kids, I decided to stay at home and I’ve been working at building a fiction writing career. Much to my surprise, I write romance novels, though calling them genre fiction with romantic elements is a little closer to the truth. I don’t think I’d know how to write a book without explosions or sword fights or gun battles. I’m also a huge Red Sox fan—I drank champagne when they finally won—and a big NFL fan, with my favorite teams being the Patriots and the Titans.

Hi! I’m Jenny. I’ve dabbled in writing most of my life, but I really started writing in earnest a couple of years ago when the local newspaper took me on to write my own Geek Mom blog. That soon led to writing for GeekDad, which has been one of the highlights of my life. I’m a lifelong geek. I’ve always loved such things as science fiction, logic games, board games, and things that make you think. I’m married and have two awesome and wickedly smart kids: a daughter, born in 2001, and a son, born in 2004. I stay at home to homeschool them, which I love doing. I homeschool for dozens of reasons, not the least of which is that I love to learn, and I learn as much as they do. I also love doing crafts, planning and taking trips, reading books, playing games, and researching just about anything on the internet.

Hey everyone, I’m Ken. I’m a geek, and a proud dad, and have been editor of the popular Wired blog GeekDad for the last three years. While running GeekDad, I’ve tried hard to make it more of a “parenting” site than just a “dad” site, and made sure to include geeky mom writers as well. But for all that time, the one question that I kept being asked was “what about Geek MOM?!” Well, it wasn’t until recently that I had a good answer. I’m really hoping GeekMom will be the perfect companion site to GeekDad, and become the destination and voice for all the geeky moms out there (of which I know there are many). We have a fantastic editorial team here, amazing contributors, and hopefully soon a wonderful community of geeky moms sharing the experience. Enjoy!